“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.”

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.

I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.

Faith looks beyond the walls of the obstacle and on to the answer.

Look inside yourself and you’ll find a world of things (a world of your own experiences)worth writing about.

Because reading is one of the joys of life, and once you begin, you can’t stop, and you’ve got so many stories to look forward to.

If it looks good, it will fly good.

To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.

I don’t look at a problem and put variables in there that don’t affect it.

I smoke. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your f-kin’ mouth.

Your looks do not define who you are.